Other Doctrines; the Jehovah's Witnesses

#95 & #96: "Both Jehovah's Witnesses and Seventh-day Adventists have
produced their own altered
versions of the Bible to reflect their aberrant doctrines. Both have set false dates for the
return of Jesus
Christ, and failed miserably to prophesy correctly."—Leslie Martin.

#95: Both have produced altered versions
of the Bible. The version used by the Jehovah's Witnesses is called the
New World
Translation. In its very title it thus claims to be a version or translation, while
The Clear Word's preface distinctly says that it is not such.
This charge is therefore false (see #80).

The documentation package under "Point 49" clearly proves that the
Watch Tower Society, the organization behind the Jehovah's
Witnesses, has produced its own official version. It is the publisher and it holds the
copyright. In contrast, "Point 49a" proves that Dr. Blanco's
The Clear Word is but a paraphrase, and that he is the publisher and
copyright holder, not the church. Therefore, it can't even truthfully be
said that the Seventh-day Adventist Church has produced its own
paraphrase.

While paraphrases by their very nature interweave interpretations into the text,
translations are not supposed to. However, as in the case of
the New World Translation, they sometimes do.

#96: Both have set dates for Christ's return. Mrs. Martin
would be hard pressed to prove that Seventh-day Adventists have ever
set dates for Christ's return, other than a renegade member now and then. Ever since they
were organized as a denomination in 1863, they have
never predicted a date for the second coming.

So is Mrs. Martin referring to some incident before 1863? Let's examine the historical
facts.

In the July 21, 1851, Review Extra, Mrs. White published a vision
of the previous September that opposed predicting dates for Christ's return
(cf. Early Writings, p. 75), a vision the video itself quoted from under #14. Before even this, in 1845 we have her opposing some first-day
Adventists who were setting dates (Early
Writings, p. 22; Arthur White, vol. 1, p. 91). That takes us just about back to
1844.

And what about 1844? In January of that year there were no Sabbath-keeping
Adventists, all Millerites being Sunday keepers. Sometime
between that spring [p. 69] and the end of the year, a single congregation in Washington, New
Hampshire, began to keep the Sabbath.

James and Ellen White did not become Sabbatarian Adventists until 1846. So before
Ellen White
became a Seventh-day Adventist, she
was already opposing the setting of dates for the second coming.

It was Methodists, Baptists, Congregationalists, and Presbyterians who predicted the
dates of 1843 and October 22, 1844, not Seventh-day
Adventists. The group that became the Seventh-day Adventist Church was the group of
Millerites which took a firm position against setting
any more dates for Christ's coming.

In contrast, Jehovah's Witnesses, or more correctly, the Watchtower Society, set a
number of dates from 1914 to 1975. Yet the video is even
wrong here. Not one of the Watchtower dates was a prediction of Christ's return. When
Barbour convinced Russell that Christ had really come
in 1874 after all, it was already 1876, and the Watchtower Society did not yet exist.
Likewise, the 1914 date for Christ's coming did not replace
1874 until the early 1930's. So with both the 1874 and the 1914 dates, the Watchtower
adopted them as dates for Christ's return after the fact.
They were not predictions.

Mrs. Martin wouldn't likely be an expert at Watchtower doctrines, even though the
video presents her as such. But the one who wrote the
script should be. Lorri MacGregor used to be a Jehovah's Witness, and her ministry is
dedicated to disseminating "facts" about Watchtower
doctrines.

Under "Point 50," the documentation package is supposed to prove
that the Watchtower set dates for Christ's coming. However, it instead
proves that they continued to teach as late as 1929 that Christ had come in 1874, thus
showing that the Watchtower never predicted Christ's
return in 1914. Regarding their predicting Christ's return in 1874, not one pre-1874
publication of the then non-existent Watchtower Society
is cited.